78th Bach Festival opens with organist Christopher Houlihan

Christopher Houlihan, a rising star in the world of organ performance, knows. He's the first performer in this year's Bach Festival, the 78th series of concerts, talks and other events presented by the Bach Festival Society of Winter Park.

Houlihan was attending Trinity College in Connecticut in 2006 when three of his classmates attended one of his performances. They so enjoyed the recital, they began calling themselves "Houli-fans." And it didn't stop there.

They started a club aimed at convincing fellow students at to attend Houlihan's recitals — and it worked. By his senior year, when he performed with the Hartford Symphony, busloads of students came to cheer from the balcony.

"They were just guys who liked music," says Houlihan, who still keeps in touch with his college buddies. "For some reason they got really into it. It was spontaneous and fun — and little bit silly."

The silly part is the nickname "Houli," which he still hears.

But the musicianship is serious business.

"Everything he plays is sharply and smartly delineated," wrote Los Angeles Times music critic Mark Swed in a review last summer. "More than four hours' worth of punishingly gnomic organ writing proved in Houlihan's hands ever graceful of shape and full of life."

What, you don't think organists are cool enough to use Facebook? Picturing an absent-minded professor or "Phantom of the Opera" type?

"It's an unfortunate misrepresentation of the organ," says Houlihan, 25. "Admittedly, it's an ancient instrument — but the people who play it are alive and well."

Organists need to be in shape: Fingers fly over multiple keyboards; arms reach out to the "stops," the knobs that control the instrument's varied sounds; and legs dart back and forth across the varied pedals.

"You get comments like 'It looks like you're dancing up there,'" Houlihan says. "'It looks like the cockpit of an airplane.'"

It's part of his mission to smash people's preconceived ideas of organ music.

"People think of it as kind of boring and droning because that's what they hear in church," he says. "But it's so colorful. I think people are really stunned they can enjoy organ music. I hear it all the time after a show: 'This is so much more exciting than I thought it would be.'"

He gets excited describing one of the works on his Bach Festival program, Franz Liszt's "Fantasy and Fugue on 'Ad nos, ad salutarem undam.'"